Part 3: May 2, 2016

May 2, 2016 begins with a series of simultaneous police raids that target a new cast of potential suspects. New details of the investigation emerge, and a journalist drawn into the story survives a day full of terror. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
High listeners. A quick note before we start. A previous
version of this episode implied that two people, Sergio Rodriguez
and Mariano Diaz, had had direct telephone contact with one another.
That section has been updated for clarity. Thanks, and here's
episode three. Felix Molina is a former radio journalist who

(00:25):
lives in Montreal, Canada, but his home is Honduras, where
his family is, his friends, the colleagues he worked alongside
for decades. But that's the country he can't return to.
He says, it just isn't safe for him. You you

(00:45):
always think about going back. It's just that living in
exile isn't the solution. Exile is just a way to
prolong my life. Alex Celio is the reason why Felix
had to leave Honduras can't be separated from the story

(01:07):
of Berta Cassarus's murder. The two of them met in
the nineteen nineties. Felix was working for a radio station
where he covered human rights and indigenous issues. Naturally, his
path crossed with Bertasana on a flint. She seemed like
an important source for a subject that I was passionate

(01:30):
about the visibility of those communities that were culturally distinct
and Nonduras the ones that for years we've been taught
about or wrongly taught about in school or Brindio. Over
the next two decades, Felix went on to host a
variety of radio programs in Honduras, and he often reached

(01:53):
out to Berta. She became something more than a source.
She was also a good friend, one he respected dania characteristic.
She had this characteristic where she'd laugh almost always, and
I'd even say that included when she was going after people,

(02:14):
giving them grief and reprimanding them. Even then she'd be
smiling fambience. But the very last time Felix Sawberta, that
playful quality had been replaced by something heavier. He spotted
her unexpectedly at an airport in El Salvador. Both of

(02:35):
them were catching connecting flights. He guesses it was about
a week before her murder. Felix could tell Berta was
worried about something. In fact, she straight up told him so.
Never before had she been so convinced she'd be assassinated

(02:57):
as she was in that conversation. Never Over the years,
Felix had talked to Berta many times about the dangers
activists faced in Honduras, but not with this sense of urgency.
She seemed convinced something bad was going to happen, and

(03:17):
soon she was certain of it. She said, they're gonna
kill me, Felix. They're gonna kill me, Libant Felix. When
Berta said they were going to kill her, Felix says
she was talking about the people working for Dessa, the

(03:38):
company overseeing the hydro electric projects she'd been protesting. About
a week after that encounter at the airport, Berta was dead,
and Felix started digging into Dessa, trying to find out
all he could about it. He worked alongside an international
human rights organization. He won't reveal the group's name. It

(03:59):
says that at a high aired private investigators to poke
around the company. Joe Dania Buenola I had a good
relationship with this organization for the past fifteen years. They
trusted my work, in my journalistic credibility, and they shared

(04:21):
with me the preliminary findings of their investigation. Those preliminary
findings included the articles of incorporation for the company. This
a a lacta constitute. It was now Monday May two,
exactly two months after Barta's murder, and for the remainder

(04:44):
of this episode, we're going to stay here. On this day,
it was Labor Day for much of Latin America, a
day off, but not for Felix. If they around Dia normal,
this was normal work day for me, while everyone else
was probably resting, probably Misconsando. He got out of bed

(05:07):
that morning expecting a slow, easy day. Neither he nor
the rest of Honduras could have realized how much would
change over the course of that day. The lid would
be ripped off Barta's investigation, new details and new evidence
would be revealed, and the lives of several people Felix

(05:28):
included would permanently veer into new directions. I'm monterereel for
Bloomberg Green and the Story of may Sewo is this
episode of Blood Ripping. M Felix hosted a radio show

(06:07):
into Goosagalpa, the Honduran capital. As it happened, his guest
on may Sewod was going to be Berte Cassarus's oldest daughter, Olivia.
Not long after Felix got out of bed, he opened
his computer. A few days before, that nonprofit group he'd
been working with had provided him a file information they

(06:28):
dug up about Dessa, the hydro electric company in Honduras.
It's not always easy to figure out who really runs
a company or whose money is behind it. Records can
be difficult to access, and even when they are available,
they're often full of holes. But this document listed names

(06:48):
of some of Dessa's executives and shareholders. Many of those
names hadn't been revealed to the public yet. As soon
as he saw it, Felix had wanted to publish it,
to send it out to the world, but a mentor
of his warned there might be risks Pucia. She advised

(07:09):
me to use caution. She said it was dangerous, and
in fact I understood that comeboy effectivement. But on that
Monday morning, Felix opened his Facebook page and took the leap.
He posted the document. Then he got ready for work,

(07:32):
stepped outside and flagged a taxi to go to the
radio studio. Traffic was lighter than usual because of the holiday,
but one road was still pretty busy, the one that
runs right in front of the presidential Palace and passed
some of the city's swankiest hotels. We were waiting at

(07:56):
the stoplight for the light to change and through this
I was distracted because it was a relaxed day and
always in this intersection there's constantly people around, street vendors,
people asking for money, jugglers, street artists. It's a stufflight
that's always full of street performers. It was a spectacle

(08:20):
that was too common for me to be concerned about them.
But the taxi driver was keeping an eye on the scene,
and that's when he noticed a young woman with blonde
hair coming up behind the car. She was holding a gun.

(08:40):
But before the driver could tell Felix about her and
another man came from another direction towards the taxi and
he tried to unexpectedly and forcibly grab my arm. I
reacted by throwing myself all the way to the other

(09:02):
side of the back seat of the taxi. In pre taxi,
the driver slammed his foot on the gas to escape.
Felix was still holding his cell phone as the taxi
lurched forward, tires squealing, and as a moment conductors a salto.

(09:28):
At that moment, the taxi driver had no doubt that
this was an assault, and he fled the scene, as
they say, and going the wrong way to get us
to safety. Pul delamos and contra villa robberies are pretty

(09:58):
common in Honduras. Felix figured the couple probably had just
wanted to steal his cell phone. He considered himself lucky
to have held onto it and to his life when
he finally made it into the studio. Felix described the
attempted robbery in a Facebook post. He ended it by typing,

(10:18):
what a country we live in? Pensicki it Alava. I
thought it was something that happened to thousands of people
in Honduras. They rubbed phones and if people resist, they
kill them. Maybe it was just a routine, though terrifying

(10:44):
example of petty street crime. Or was there more to
it than that? For Felix, that question would grow bigger
and scarier as the day pushed on. The Morning of

(11:06):
May two also got off to a rocky start for
Sergio Rodriguez. Remember Sergio. He was Dessa's point man for
the ahwa's Arca Damn and Rio Blanco, where Berta had
rallied protesters against the project. Sergio had started off as
the man in charge of environmental standards. Later his duties

(11:28):
expanded to include community relations. After Berta was killed Some
of her colleagues had told investigators that Sergio had threatened her,
and so a couple of weeks after the murder, the
investigators called him in to ask him about it. He
denied the threats. After that questioning, they also made Sergio

(11:52):
list his address into Goosey Galpa in case they needed
to reach him. Sergio had an apartment in the capital,
but that not the address he listed. Instead, he told
them the address of his mother's house. He says he
wasn't trying to deceive them, and he didn't really think
anything about it until that morning on May two, the

(12:15):
same morning when Felix Molina had experienced that strange encounter
in the taxicab. That morning, Sergio's phone woke him up
at about five thirty. It was his attorney calling. He
told Sergio the police had a warrant to search what

(12:36):
they thought was his house. So Sergio got out of bed,
put on a yellow Polo shirt and a pair of khakis,
and went to his mom's. When I got there, I
saw all the police cars and military vehicles, people wearing
balaclavas from the Federal Agency of Investigation and the prosecutors.

(12:59):
I was there before or six in the morning at
my mom's and they told me I was being arrested
for the death of Betts. As they read him his rights,

(13:19):
Sergio watched them search every corner of the house. They
searched one bedroom at a time, going through the closets,
the bathrooms. Officers were noting the colors of the closet
doors and the bedspreads. His mother struggled to sort through
the confusion in lyme pres Obviously, I was concerned about

(13:44):
the impression this had on my mom. My mom is
an eighty four year old woman. I was worried about
her health, so I asked them, please, please, could you
avoid exposing me to the media? VANDAM released. The investigators
had other priorities they were hunting for evidence. The only

(14:09):
item of note they collected from this raid was Sergio's
cell phone, a gold Samsung Galaxy Edge with a black case.
But this wasn't the only place being searched that morning.
At the exact same time, ten separate teams of investigators
and military police were launching simultaneous raids. While Sergio watched

(14:33):
them pick apart his mother's place, another team was rifling
through the Dessa offices inside it to goose Galpa high rise,
and other teams were raiding the houses of five other men.
Three of those men would be arrested that same morning,
along with Sergio. By the time of police escorted Sergio

(15:01):
out of his mother's house, dozens of reporters were outside.
Their cameras were ready as he was escorted past them.
The police draped a fuzzy yellow blanket over Sergio's head
and led him into the back seat of an unmarked car.
Sergio's request to the police to keep things quiet apparently

(15:23):
had backfired. Thea Luno from Mikasa. The only place the
media showed up was my house, Sergio, and the news
of the arrests flooded the airwaves in Honduras that morning.
Being practical, military spokesman listed the names of Sergio and

(15:51):
the three others who've been arrested that morning. The first
was a former Honduran military officer who previously had been
in charge of secure Purity Fordessa, near the Gualukakee River.
The second was a veteran of the Hondurans Special Forces,
an army major who worked in military intelligence. The third

(16:12):
was a year old one of at least three suspected cicadios,
or hitman hired to kill albert To the police hauled
all four men to a federal building into Gooseagalpa. Meanwhile,
other officers were cataloging the evidence collected during the raids.

(16:32):
They had cell phones, tablets, and hard drives. Agents turned
the home of the accused hitman inside out, and then
they searched the home next door, where his twin brother lived.
They stripped the sheets from the beds and lifted the mattresses.
Underneath one mattress they found something interesting, a gun with

(16:56):
a white plated handle. It was a Smith and Wesson
thirty eight special, the same kind of gun that had
killed Berta. Police called it Operation Jaguar. For weeks, the

(17:28):
investigators had been planning this morning of raids in the
two months after the murder. The Cassarra's family and really
everyone in Honduras saw the investigation as a series of missteps.
Those missteps were real, and investigators wasted weeks following too
many false leads. They'd seemed too suspicious of Berta's friends,

(17:53):
her colleagues, and especially of Gustavo Castro. Suberta's family and colleagues.
It seemed in those early days that no one was
looking at Dessa the hydro Electric Company. But now, exactly
two months after the murder, it was clear that investigators
had in fact shifted their focus away from Barta's close friends.

(18:16):
Several disconnected clues had come together, and police believed they
pointed to Dessa. A couple of days after the murder,
police had gotten their hands on a thumb drive, the
kind you pop into a USB port on a computer.
This drive actually had been plugged into a security camera.

(18:36):
That camera had captured grainy images of the road leading
into Bartas subdivision. Investigators scanned the files on the thumb
drive and found the footage from the night Rita was killed.
On that video, at PM, you see headlights from a
vehicle nearing the subdivision. The vehicle stops and three p

(19:00):
bolt visible only as silhouettes run through the camera frame.
You can't make out any faces. This was one of
the first pieces of evidence that gave investigators an idea
of what they now think really happened on the night
of Berta's murder. It was just the start. Days after

(19:30):
the murder, police pulled data from the cellular phone towers
closest to Berta's house, but it took them about five
weeks to analyze it. Aside from the other residents of
the subdivision, five cell phones had been active near Berta's
house surround the time of the murder. The police believed
that three of those phones belonged to the hitman, including

(19:53):
one who had been arrested on May two at the
same time as Sergio Rodriguez. Sarah Geo's phone could not
be traced to the subdivision that night, but that didn't
mean he was cleared. There was still more evidence to collect.
Bread crumbs of The police were following clues that seemed
to connect Dessa to the others who had been at

(20:14):
the scene of the crime. One of the other three
men arrested in the early morning raids of May two
was named Mariano Diaz. He was the army major, the
guy who worked in military intelligence. But months before Berta's
murder on during investigators had started keeping an eye on him.
This had nothing to do with Berta, at least not

(20:37):
at first. They thought Diaz might be linked to a
drug trafficking and kidnapping ring. They began tracing his phone calls.
That phone tap turned out to be an incredible stroke
of luck. After Berta was killed, investigators realized that Diaz
had been in contact with people connected to Dessa. The

(21:03):
more they looked at the phone records, the more connections emerged.
Both Sergio and Diaz had also been talking to the
former deaths As security chief, a man named Douglas Bustillo.
He also would be arrested in the raids of may Sewo. Bustillo,
in turn, had also been in regular contact with two

(21:26):
suspected gunmen that police had tracked a Berta's house the
night of the murder. All of this information justified the
warrant the police used for the May second raids. Investigators
laid out a hypothetical plot they believed Sergio and Diaz,
the expert in military intelligence, were each involved in planning

(21:47):
separate aspects of the murder. Sergio, they said, helped surveil
Berto through a network of informants. Diaz had handled other details,
like getting the guns in the vehicle used for the crime.
Both of them separately were in contact with the former
desks A security chief, Bustillo. The police alleged Boustillo helped

(22:11):
put together the team of cicarios, low level criminals willing
to kill for a payday. The company immediately denied all
involvement in the murder and continues to dispute this interpretation
of events, But for investigators it emerged as a working theory.

(22:33):
They still needed proof, of course, and that was the
mission of the raids that morning, to collect cell phones, computers,
and tablets, anything that might be hiding more evidence. That
thirty eight special they found under a mattress seemed to
back up the investigator's theory, or at least it didn't

(22:53):
contradict it. A ballistics expert would later examine the gun
alongside some of this shell fragments collected in Bertha's house.
They matched. That afternoon, Sergio and the other three men

(23:17):
were locked behind bars. They held me in preventative detention
and took me to a maximum security prison. It was
a huge shock. He listened to other inmates screaming, and
then all of a sudden, everything went dark. Ceph and Lewis.

(23:44):
The electricity went out, and the first thing I thought
was that they were going to kill me because of
all the stories you hear about what it's like in
the federal penitentiary and Penitentially, it's late afternoon out on
May second, Felix Molina is inside the radio studio like

(24:05):
everyone else. He's been following the news, catching reports about
the raids and the arrests. Felix had planned to talk
to Barratt's oldest daughter, Olivia on his show that afternoon,
but the Cassara's family had been caught off guard by
the events of that morning. They first learned of the
raids when reporters started calling them. Olivia and her sisters

(24:29):
said that because they didn't know anything about the arrests,
they couldn't be sure that the true architects of the
assassination had been captured. Olivia said that the four men
arrested might have been fall guys. We don't trust the
judicial system in this country. We don't believe in it.

(24:53):
Felix also had his doubts, and after the attempted robbery
that morning, he was thinking a lot about his own safety.
I mentioned it on air, and there were people who
heard this and who saw my Facebook post and who
were worried for me. He call me post. Those calls

(25:17):
from concerned listeners included one from members of a local
human rights organization. They invited Felix to their office to
tell them more about the assault. They knew Felix had
publicly posted the names of Death's executives and investors earlier
that morning, and they suspected the assault might be connected

(25:37):
to that. So late that afternoon, Felix caught another cab
to their office. He told them all the details of
the hold up once he got there, about how the
woman and the man had threatened him at gunpoint, how
is quick thinking taxi driver had sped away just in time.
By the time the meeting was over and it was

(25:58):
time for him to go, Felix actually felt a little
nervous those personas, And I asked two people who were
there at the office at the time if they'd come
with me outside to look for a taxi. And it
took a long time to find a cab to take

(26:20):
me back to my house. Finally I grabbed the street
taxi like I always do, Como on tax On his
way home, he realized he was seeing the same familiar buildings,
the same familiar streets that he'd passed by earlier in
the day on his way to work. This was the

(26:44):
avenue where he had been assaulted that morning, near the
Presidential Palace by the five star hotels. The taxi made
its way to the very street light where Felix had
narrowly escaped danger earlier that morning. He sat there in
the taxi waiting for the light to change, just like before,

(27:04):
but this time he was paying attention. His eyes scanned
the street. He noticed movement around the car. It didn't
feel right, yea mislus generals personas sin person, and that
the same street light. This time it wasn't two people,

(27:27):
but rather five people who surrounded the taxi while we
waited for the light to change. They told me, this
time you won't escape. He may staves. A man reached
into the taxi and grabbed Felix with one hand. In
his other hand, the man held a pistol He made

(27:50):
the sparrow. He shot me point blank. La valla. The
bullet that he shot at me went through both my legs.

(28:14):
The assailants fled, and a group of bystanders rushed to
Felix's taxi to see if they could help. I really
could have bled to death in the taxi. I was scared, crying.
I didn't know what to do. The people insisted taking

(28:34):
me to the hospital because I couldn't move, I couldn't
get up from the seat. I couldn't feel my legs.
So finally I got to the public hospital, the teaching hospital,
and just as I got to the entrance of the hospital,
I lost consciousness. Who's hospital. Felix had spent that late

(28:56):
morning devouring media reports about the arrests in Barton's murder case.
Now as evening approached, he himself had become part of
the news and Honduras, a prominent radio journalist has been
shot four times but survived. Felix Molina was reportedly attacked

(29:16):
twice in the same day Monday. He was shot twice
in each leg, and a statement released by human rights
group Molina said he believed he was directly targeted and
vowed to continue practicing journalism without fear. He said, quote,
I declare myself a survivor of the insecurity that the
majority of the country faces. Molina shooting came on the

(29:39):
eve of World Press Freedom Day. So Felix is in
his hospital bit and he's replaying everything in his mind.
The news that morning suggested that current and former military officials,
including at least one in military intelligence, had been detained
in Barton's murder, and Felix begins to think about the

(30:02):
assault on him. It seems so organized, so pre planned,
and he's growing convinced both of the assaults against him
that day we're connected to Berta's murder the Swiss Siskyspitale.
After the second attack, after I was in the hospital,

(30:25):
I started to reflect on this, on the motus of
arandi of criminal organizations in Honduras, it was all there
in assassination of Bertha. You had military men who were
experts and intelligence trained by the Special Forces, and then
you had hired hitman without experience as a way to
mislead investigations. So I started to reflect that what happened

(30:49):
to me wasn't just an everyday crime, that it was
a consequence of my coverage of the story of Verta Casis.
His assailants were never caught, and he can't prove they
were connected to the company or its shareholders, who completely
deny all involvement. But Felix is convinced that the events

(31:11):
of that day amounted to more than a chain of coincidences.
And now now I can say without any doubt that
I suffered the consequences of reporting on the work and
on the assassination of Berta cas It is definitely covert.

(31:32):
Ultravajo definite. It's nighttime now. On May two, the President
of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, held a press conference a

(31:53):
few hours earlier to celebrate the four arrests. Now, he's
preparing for a trip the next morning. He needs to
be in Washington, d C. That's where an energy summit
is being held for leaders from the US, Mexico, and
the Caribbean. Hernandez is scheduled to meet with some very
high profile attendees at that conference. Vice President Joe Biden

(32:18):
is one of them. Hernandez wants to assure him that
renewable energy projects like hydro electric dams, our developments worth
backing and integrated North America working to promote energy security
beyond our borders can be a major asset for the
entire hemisphere, and it is profoundly it's profoundly in the

(32:40):
self interest of the United States to see the Caribbean
country succeed. Secretary of State John Kerry has been optimistic
about energy partnerships with Central American countries, especially those countries
encouraging private sector involvement. Every one of US, I think,
should take note of the that the Caribbean and Central

(33:02):
American nations continue to pursue legal, regulatory and policy reforms.
Are going to modernize and integrate their energy systems and
make private sector clean energy more attractive in all of
those places. Clean energy for Hernandez government, hydro electric projects
like the Awazarka Dam. We're supposed to be the lynch

(33:23):
pins in Honduras's economic renaissance. Fernandez himself, back when he
was the head of the Honduran National Congress, had been
the one to draft that strategy. But now Barta's killing
was a black cloud over all of that. Hernandez like
to say that Honduras was open for business, but who

(33:46):
is going to pour money into a local industry that
was marred by high profile scandal in violence. The timing
of all of this didn't sit right with Barta's family.
Was it all a big quin students? Exactly one day
before the President of Honduras attends a summit to promote

(34:07):
his renewable energy agenda, his government, to great fanfare, announces
the arrests of Berta's killers. The Cassaris family issued a
statement online and above it they posted photos the ones
that the government released that day of agents standing next

(34:28):
to a handcuffed Sergio Rodriguez. The statement began. The Honduran
government made a surprise announcement on Monday morning, claiming to
have caught the culprits who assassinated Berta. The most impressive
detail is that they were able to snap many well
posed photos of those culprits alongside federal agents. Despite this show,

(34:51):
we continue our call for an independence international investigation. Even
after the arrests, the family still didn't trust the Honduran investigators.

(35:11):
That evening, Berta's daughter, Bertita Isabelle, was monitoring everything that
was unfolding from thousands of miles away in Barcelona. She
and others from Copaine had met with members of the
European Parliament that week. They were lobbying for support. Bertita
was calling for an international investigation into her mom's murder.

(35:35):
The arrest that morning didn't satisfy her. On the night
of May sewo Bertita isabel stood on a concert stage.
She was next to Manu Chow, French and Spanish rock
star who sold millions of albums in Europe and Latin America.

(36:02):
Bar Tita Isabel is saying that her mother didn't die.
She multiplied that's become a rallying cry that bears his
family and their backers have spread around the world. The
family is trying to assemble an international team of lawyers
and investigators to re examine the evidence in the case,
to look at it all with fresh eyes. Even after

(36:25):
the arrests of that day, She and her family believe
the Honduran investigation has been corrupted from the start. Sergio
Rodriguez was a mid level employee of the hydro electric
company bart His family suspects he was a puppet following
a plan that had been masterminded by his superiors, perhaps

(36:45):
some of the same people whose names had appeared on
the document that Felix Molina had posted on his Facebook
page earlier that morning. In the next couple of months,
the family would continue to travel to the United States
and around the world, and that international team of investigators
would take shape. After the raids of the morning of

(37:08):
May two, on during investigators as well as that international team,
would have a lot more information to sift through. The
phones that had been confiscated were full of information. The
most interesting evidence by far was the WhatsApp text messages
pulled from them, and so we got fifty five gigs

(37:30):
of data they had extracted from their cell phones, which
was a tiny fraction of the data, and it was
about pages. Those messages will become the foundation of the case.
A new, far more dramatic story will take shape, one

(37:54):
that will lead investigators towards the person they'll describe as
the mastermind behind the murder. That's next time on Blood River. M.

(38:16):
Blood River is written and reported by me monte Reel
top Forehes is our senior producer. My Aquava is our
associate producer. A theme was composed and performed by Sena Rubinos.
Special thanks to Carlos Rodriguez. Francesca Levi is the head
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(38:41):
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